DataStax and the Cassandra Community

DataStax’s contributions to the Cassandra community cover a wide range of needs, all oriented towards your success in building Cassandra-based applications. I think of these as the “Three C’s of Community”: Code, Coaching, and Conferences.

Code

Cassandra

Obviously, DataStax continues to contribute to Apache Cassandra™ itself. Besides contributing the majority of the “tick-tock” releases culminating in the current 3.11, DataStax has contributed multiple features to the upcoming 4.0 release. These include:

I’m happy to announce that as of today we are also releasing the DataStaxDistributionofApacheCassandra as a new subscription offering to help fit the feature and price point that the community has asked us for.

Drivers

DataStax also maintains themostpopularCassandradriversforsevenlanguages. Collectively, these represent an estimated 36 engineer-years of effort. The Java driver alone includes over 300,000 lines of code added or modified in over 800 commits since Jan 2017. These drivers are completely open source with a liberal Apache license.

DataStax also recently updated itscontributorlicenseagreement (CLA) to align more closely with the Apache Software Foundation’s ICLA. Non-DataStax contributions make up close to 100 commits across all drivers for this time frame.

TinkerPop

Besides the tabular, document, and key-value models supported by Cassandra, DataStaxEnterprisealsoprovidesaGraphengine. DataStax contributes the majority of code to the graph framework ApacheTinkerPop™, which provides standard, vendor-neutral ways of working with graph applications. TinkerPop is used by pure-play graph vendors like OrientDB as well as Amazon Neptune, IBM Graph and Microsoft Cosmos DB.

Other Contributions

DataStax’s engineers are also pleased to share some of the other great things that they work on with the open-source community. These include:

Coaching

From DataStax Academy to DataStax Developer Day to worldwide meetups, we pride ourselves on our commitment to coaching and educating developers on everything Apache Cassandra.

DataStaxAcademy has long been known for high quality, free training on both Apache Cassandra and DataStax Enterprise (DSE). We’ve recently refreshed our course catalog to reflect updates to the latest versions, including two courses that focus almost exclusively on Cassandra concepts:

We continue to maintain an active DataStaxAcademySlack community with hundreds of active community users and active participation from DataStax experts. We also produce and host the weekly DistributedDataShow and other how–tocontent directly and indirectly related to Cassandra and DSE.

Meetups

DataStax’s Developer Relations team has also been active in theCassandrameetupscene. In addition to working to inject new energy into Cassandra-focused meetups, we’re also getting the word out at other NoSQL / Big Data meetups, and hosting a monthly Distributed Systems meetup in Seattle. You can track where we’re headed next on our events page.

Conferences

In 2019, DataStax is bringing its experience in organizing the Cassandra Summit for six years to the Washington, DC metro area with a new conference: DataStaxAccelerate.

Accelerate will feature cutting-edge content from DataStax experts and the Cassandra community for data architects, DBAs, Cassandra developers, IT administrators and architects, and IT executives. Accelerate will also include a full-day Cassandra Application Bootcamp that teaches the fundamentals for building an application with Apache Cassandra that can run everywhere.